Nha Trang

I woke up a few times thinking the cars honking on the street were my alarm clock. When I finally decided to get up, it was around 8:45am. Alyssa and Jessica had clearly been up for a while and seemed to hover around me as I got ready and started packing up. Check out wasn't until 12:00pm, so we headed down for breakfast before finishing up with our stuff in the room. Apparently Jessica had gone down to have breakfast at 6:00am, so just Alyssa and I needed to eat. Sadly, the restaurant at this hostel was nowhere near as good as the one at B & B hostel. We ended up with bread and butter, cold coffee and bruised fruit...this didn't put me in a very good mood.
After packing our stuff and putting our bags in the holding area, we ventured out in the city to walk around. We started by visiting the temple located in the lake. Once we had crossed the bridge and got a good look at the temple, it was really nothing special. We did get some information about the giant turtles that supposedly live in the lake and are a central player in the ancient lore of Hanoi. It is said that King Le returned the sacred sword he had used to defeat his enemies to a Ho Gum tortoise that lived in the lake and people still believe that the sword is buried somewhere beneath the water.

We then walked around the local street markets. Jessica had never had a lychee before, so we had to buy some of those for her to try.

Finally it was time for us to head to the airport. We had hired a private car to drive us there since the bus was much more complicated and I like to know that I'll be there on time. The cost for the ride was $15 USD but when we arrived and tried to give him USD that Jessica had from America, he said he wanted dong instead. So we gave him the payment in dong but apparently the bill was too large and he didn't have change. So we went back and forth do a few minutes before he finally agreed to take the $15. It was really funny because to us US money is all the same but in Vietnam, they don't like the smaller bills or any that are old, bent or discolored.
Once we had checked in and gone through security, we looked for somewhere to get lunch. There really were only two options and they both seemed to serve the same food, so we sat down to peruse the menu. We decided to all get chicken ramen as the other things on the menu did not sound appetizing. As we looked at the other people in the restaurant, we realized that they serve instant ramen (similar to cup 'o noodles). Although there were 13 people working at the restaurant, none of them seemed interested in working. Alyssa had to go retrieve a waitress to take our order. Since there were no other options, we all order chicken ramen and when we found out they were out of chicken we all wound up with beef. As we waited, the waitress dropped some wet towels off for each of us to use. After eating our ramen, we requested the check some could board our flight. They dropped off one check with just the ramen and then returned a minute later with a new check that charged us $3 for the wet towels. This was absolutely insane and clearly just them trying to rips off. Vietnam is notorious for that and I was in no mood. Alyssa tried to reason with them but I simply refused to pay it and left. They knew they couldn't make us pay for it so they didn't try to stop us from leaving. It's incidents like that which make people dislike Vietnam.

When we arrived in Nha Trang, our pickup driver was waiting amongst the crowd with a sign that had our names on it. He seemed so excited when we picked him out of all of the other people waiting which was really cute. He had a nice car to drive us to the hostel in which was welcome since it was about a 40 minute drive to the hostel. When we arrived, we were happy to see that Nha Trang was an adorable beach town with tons of nice shops and restaurants. We checked into our hostel which was less nice than the one we had in Hanoi, but still perfectly fine. The one annoying feature about it was that the shower did not have its own space; they had a shower head in the bathroom and a drain in the floor and you were supposed to use the entire bathroom as the shower which meant the floor was always wet and disgusting. Not a great design.

After dropping off our bags, we decided to head out for something to eat. We ended up at "Olivia's" which had. A ton of different options to choose from. We split a delicious veggie pizza and Mediterranean salad. Then we walked around the town for a while checking out the scene. We were happy that it was so much less crowded and more relaxed than Hanoi and decided to stay for four days to make the most of it.

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